Elena Cattaneo graduated in Pharmacy in 1986 (summa cum laude) and obtained her PhD in Biotechnology Applied to Pharmacology from the University of Milan, where she has been teaching as
full Professor of Pharmacology since 2003. She is director of the “Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Pharmacology of Neurodegenerative Diseases” at the Department of Biosciences, and is
co-founder and director of UniStem, the University of Milan’s Centre for Stem Cell Research.

She spent 3 years working at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science of MIT (Boston). Here she began studying neural stem cell differentiation in the striatum, a region of the brain
involved in the pathophysiology of a number of neurodegenerative diseases. On returning to Italy, she oriented her research toward Huntington’s disease. The laboratory has been established for 20
years and is now affiliated to the Department of Biosciences at University of Milan.

She has published more than 150 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals and has participated in more than 350 events as an invited speaker, including congresses or workshops organized by
research institutions and universities.